Gil Mansergh’s Cinema Toast
New Releases 6/29/07

Ratatouille (G)
Voices of Patton Oswalt, Brad Garrett, Brian Denehey, Jeanine Garoffolo, Peter O’Toole, Lou Romano, Ian Holm
Directed by: Brad Bird
Pixar/Disney’s latest computer animated fable is “Ratatouille,” the unlikely story of a French rat who loves to cook and ends up secretly guiding a restaurant garbage boy into preparing 5-star meals. The film is delightful, the artwork is so amazing it is almost unbelievable, the voice overs are great, the chase sequences are exciting, the love scenes are endearingly klutzy, you can almost smell and taste the food, Paris never looked lovelier, and the rat is…well even though the animators have given him all the cuteness and personality traits of Jacques and Gus Gus, the cute little mice in “Cinderella” (who, I should point out, were also French), the hero Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) remains a rat “but a rat with principles. “We’re thieves,” Remy complains to his father, “and I won’t steal.” But what will happen when Remy’s brother and his friends appear at the restaurant’s back door for some handouts?
4 pieces of delicious toast.

Live Free or Die Hard aka Die Hard 4 (PG-13)
Bruce Willlis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant
Directed by: Len Wiseman
John McClane is on screen again, a little balder, a little paunchier, a little blinder (and his hearing’s going too–but who wouldn’t after being in all those explosions). This time it’s a disgruntled former government security specialist (and former sheriff from Deadwood) out to take over the world. Don’t stop to wonder if a fighter jet can really fly under a freeway overpass, just siddown, shuddup, and holdon.
3 pieces of older but better toast

Sicko (PG-13)
Michael Moore
Directed by: Michael Moore
Moore likes to insert himself front and center into his documentaries, and this expose’ of the broken and perhaps unfixable helalth care industry in the USA, continues this tradition. Yes, it takes some cheap shots. Yes, it uses decade old-arcchival footage, but Moore is a saavy film maker who knows how to keep our interest.
3 and 1/2 pieces of corporate medicine toast

Evening (PG-13)
Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Natasha Richardson
Directed by: Lajos Koltai
What should be an acting tour-de-force featuring some of the best females ever to grace a movie screen (including real-life, mother/daughter pairs) instead turns out to be fueled by a screenplay that doesn’t seem to understand the movie maxim “less is more.” When a dying woman crys out the her beloved’s name, her surprised family never heard of him. Sort of like the long secret affair between the National Geographic photographer and the farmer’s wife in “Bridges of Madison County,” but with out Eastwood’s directing skill.
2 pieces of falls flat toast

NEW ON VIDEO/DVD

Black Snake Moan (R)
Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci , Justin Timberlake
Directed by: Craig Brewer
Box Office: $9,262,318
With a white girl chained half naked to a black blues musician’s radiator, this film is exploitation plus–but, under all the tawdry stuff, there is a morality play going on. Think of it as Southern Gothic playing the Race Card
3 pieces of Jackson and Ricci make this work toast

Shooter (R)
Mark Wahlberg, Kate Ara, Danny Glover, Ned Beatty
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Box Office: $46,975,183
In this post- 9/11 marriage of “3 Days of the Condor,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” and “The Jackel” the political paranoia runs very, very deep as a trained killer is set up as the fall-guy assassin and then tracked by other, perhaps even better trained, killers. Designed for guys who like their killing done from a distance (in contrast to the up-close-and-personal swords and spears in “300″) this film about a embittered military sniper should work just fine. Heads don’t just roll, they splatter.
3 pieces of straight shooter toast

Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (NR)
Allison Hayes, William Hudson
Directed by: Nathan Juran
50 times more fun than the remake starring Darryl Hannah, this camp classic was originally released in 1958 as a drive-in double feature with the long forgotten “War of the Satellites.” This tragic tale is of a woman done wrong who takes revenge on her husband by smothering him with her humongous mammaries (mega-enchanced curtesy of some outer space aliens she met in the desert). I remember seeing this as a young teen and being very interested in the logistics of keeping scraps of clothing covering her body as she got bigger and the cloth didn’t.
4 pieces of long, tall toast